Is that the sound of the stampede? No, what you are hearing is the sound of the customer service-led growth (CSLG) movement, and it is coming at full speed!
The reason for this constant boom is that customer-led growth strategies help brands boost net revenue retention (NRR), customer satisfaction (CSAT), and, of course, GROWTH.
A survey by Salesforce reveals that the quality of customer support influences the purchasing decision of about 4 out of 5 customers.
While customer service leaders negotiate the ever-changing reality, they must determine how to push their businesses forward. Unfortunately, decoding customer behavior has been among the greatest challenges for organizations for years.
As such, shaping a growth trajectory based on a customer-driven approach is quintessential. In such strategies, customer feedback and insights primarily influence several mission-critical decisions, from what UX/UI to design, to what features to launch, to what customer service process to implement.
Use case understanding is one of those retention-based growth methods brands use for these intentions.
But why understand customer use cases? While talking about human interactions, it is quality instead of quantity that eventually matters most – now more than ever seen.
In customer service, use cases describe all the possible ways customers utilize a particular service or feature to meet their needs/address specific pain points. They underline the individual experiences of customers so brands can better connect with them.
Businesses build use cases to determine success and failure scenarios and any crucial exceptions or variations in customer support. As people purchase the same service for multiple reasons, use cases vary based on particular circumstances.
While understanding use cases takes a fair share of effort, it is well worth the effort. A well-orchestrated use case equips customer service agents with actionable insights to identify pain points, key areas for improvement, and ways to improve customer growth and retention.
For instance, the manufacturing industry has a reputation for being slow and hard to communicate with. Duplicate responses, missed emails, and delayed deliveries due to back-and-forth communication used to dent their efficacy and client satisfaction. One such victim of ineffective communication was the UK-based manufacturer – Get It Made.
Now the company has adopted a service-led growth framework to break this stereotype and streamline its workflows and communication. Using data analytics and reporting in customer service software, Get It Made can monitor crucial client and project-related insights and, above all, access real-time customer service metrics.
Similarly, telecom operators have to cope with fluctuating support volumes, facing ticket overflows during certain times of the day, month, and year. As such, scheduling customer service agents for peak periods becomes challenging, resulting in increased response times.
To overcome the problem, telecom companies leverage artificial intelligence-driven chatbots to manage high query influx without upscaling their staff. Moreover, these chatbots boast an unlimited capacity, meaning their efficiency scales up or down in ways that conventional support systems could not.
There are several telecom operators already using chatbots to improve their customer service. One such example is Vodafone’s digital assistant, TOBi, designed to answer most customer queries and enable users to manage their accounts, all while boosting the customer experience.
Let’s look at how understanding use cases is essential for customer service-led growth and how it benefits your organization – and your customers.
A deeper understanding of customer use cases helps you understand vulnerabilities plaguing your customer service and gain additional touchpoints or enhance existing ones. That means no more guesswork.
Determining how customers utilize your customer support lets you pinpoint issues, where they are trying to engage but cannot, or where completing an action requires considerable effort.
These insights act as a guideline for better customer service delivery, quality improvement, and creating a practical unique selling point (USP) to level up your customer experience in 2023.
Personalization is critical to incredible customer service as people value brands that realize their unique needs. In fact, you can boost your online conversion rate by roughly 8% by tailoring consumer experiences.
Understanding customer use cases enables you to deep-dive into people’s sentiments during support interactions. That way, you can tailor your customer-led growth strategies to satiate every client across all touchpoints and, eventually, address their needs in a more personalized manner going forward.
For instance, offering tailored support across multiple communication channels or fine-tuning post-onboarding journeys so customers can adapt your services to their needs.
Including insights collected via use case understanding to deliver personalized customer service helps brands improve key performance indicators (KPI), including customer lifetime value (CLV), customer retention, and customer satisfaction.
Every organization receives 578 tickets a day, 3,991 a week, and 17,630 a month, says a report.
Customer service-led growth, like any other business operation, works on the Pareto principle – more commonly known as the 80-20 rule. More than 80% of all customer queries stem from 20% of repetitive questions.
These mostly hover around level-1 tech support, pre-sales and post-sales queries, and user onboarding. Thanks to use case understanding, you can single out that 20% data set of recurring requests and create automated, canned responses for them.
The result? You and your agents have more time to deal with critical customer-facing communications needing a personal touch.
Here are four ways to make the best use of use case understanding for customer service in 2023:
You must have learned this old adage in elementary school – “Knowledge is power.” Most entrepreneurs remain in the false impression that they can coast along on a surface-level understanding of their offerings.
If you do not properly study what you are selling, failure is just a few miles away. So, dig deep into your product/service and how they relate to your customers. Every customer-facing interaction houses a wealth of data, from pain points and expectations to why they prefer you over the competition.
Then, highlight all the possible customer use cases of your service and bring them under the microscope to understand them better.
When it comes to understanding use cases in customer service-led growth, housing a diverse workforce brings a multitude of ideas and perspectives to the table. During brainstorming sessions, every stakeholder brings unique experiences, backgrounds, and knowledge, which help highlight insights and nuances to identify numerous use cases and solutions to customer pain points.
This drives collaborative problem-solving as team members build upon one another’s ideas in new and exciting ways. The greater the diversity in skillsets, the more dynamic and effective these brainstorming sessions become.
The potential of modern technology in today’s business economy can easily dazzle anyone. Unfortunately, you could fall into the trap of buying solutions with endless features thinking you need all of these to function optimally. However, that is not always the case.
Your customer service tech suite will vary based on your business needs and customer use cases. Accordingly, invest in technologies that align with your organizational goals and help you examine customer use cases effectively.
For instance, data analytics extract qualitative insights from all customer-facing communications (chats, phone calls, survey feedback, and emails). These include customer sentiments, expectations, and behavior patterns. These findings help you determine where to channel your customer service efforts and if you need to modify your existing processes.
Understanding use cases works wonders with viewpoints from not only your customer service agents but also other departments – marketing, product/service development, and UX.
Hence, organize in-person boardroom meetings with various stakeholders and gather their feedback to understand how they communicate with customers. These diverse insights will flex your brain muscles and help establish a watertight service-led growth strategy.
Such cross-functional collaborations eliminate guesswork around the benefits and the struggles customers face while using your offerings.
While use case understanding in customer-led growth brings umpteen benefits, it also presents various challenges. Read on some common challenges that companies may face:
Understanding use cases is complex, particularly if you have to consider numerous products/services or customer segments. You could struggle with identifying all possible use cases and must dedicate considerable resources and time to holistically understand customer preferences and needs.
To overcome this complexity, break down the process into smaller, more manageable tasks. Start by focusing on the most prevalent customer service use cases and later expand to more intricate scenarios. Further, joining hands with other departments and teams can help you identify all possible use cases efficiently.
Businesses, especially those that have just taken off, may lack access to sufficient data to understand customer use cases thoroughly. As such, they find it challenging to identify patterns or trends and develop effective services/products.
Too less data makes the flow of use case understanding meaningless.
To make well-informed decisions, deploy data analytics tools and resources to gather and examine more insights. Plus, conduct surveys on the target audience to better understand customer expectations and demands. Finally, emphasize the vital aspects and keep on adding insights till every stakeholder is satisfied.
But how detailed a customer service use case should be?
To the furthest extent and in as much data as necessary to clearly demonstrate customer use cases.
Keeping every stakeholder across teams and departments in the know is a must in use case understanding. Else, inefficient communication leads to misunderstandings or information gaps, hampering the effectiveness of customer service-led growth strategies.
To optimize communication, establish crystal-clear channels and protocols. Moreover, use collaboration tools and software to ensure data access to everyone in real-time.
Your customer service agents must know how to best serve people in their roles, especially those on the front lines. Indeed, they must have the tools to manage multiple situations.
However, customer service agents may not have the necessary training or resources to carry out use case understanding effectively. This results in inefficiencies, errors, and suboptimal outcomes. In fact, 7 out of 10 people complain about the inept training of customer service agents.
To tackle the situation, organize holistic training programs to equip your staff with the expertise and skills to understand customer use cases accurately. Plus, offer ongoing support and feedback to reinforce the training.
Digging deeper into every use case is crucial so that you know your focus groups and the goals they achieve by using your services. This is especially true during complex customer-facing communications where extracting insights is essential to rethink and test your product/service.
However, if you blindly apply this approach for every use case, you are simply piling up the data sets, let alone the subsequent time wasted in reviewing them. All these without driving any additional value to your customer service framework.
Instead of addressing every possible use case, prioritize them based on their frequency and impact. For instance, identify the most prevalent and critical use cases having the biggest impact on customer satisfaction and focus on those initially. That way, you can allocate your resources effectively and ensure the best possible support for the most pressing issues.
Understanding customer use cases helps you determine exactly how users engage with your brand and product/service at multiple touchpoints – and what they are doing or thinking at each stage.
While you might feel that you are adequately fulfilling your customer needs, there are chances that you are not, which is why customers move away to your competitors. That said, you can truly deliver on that promise by deep-diving into practical use cases.
Consider your use case understanding a living record. Refer back to it while reimagining your customer service in 2023 (design, testing, and launch) to drive retention-based growth.
If you accomplish this mission, you will provide more customer-centricity your business needs to write a success story.
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Understanding use cases fuels service-led growth in the following ways:
For proper use case understanding, follow these tips:
Organizations aiming for better customer retention encounter the following challenges while understanding use cases:
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